“By the time she was 30, the formidable painter and writer Leonora Carrington had had an affair with Max Ernst, endured a nervous breakdown, been forcibly installed in a mental institution, fled to Mexico, and written a harrowing memoir about madness,” says Dahl.

Carrington’s involvement with the Surrealist movement was productive and complex but it reflects, argues Dahl, the “narrow, fetishistic path the movement had for women” — with male superstar artists often making talented women their “muses.”

Carrington claimed the role was “bullshit,” adding “I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse. I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist.”

And she never stopped imploring people to “question the erasure of women in history, to question men and those in power,” Dahl says, and pointing to “gaps and peculiarities that only begin to make sense if understood as a covering-up for a very different kind of civilization which had been eliminated.”